British Army and Royal Navy release details of redundancy schemes

The Army and the Royal Navy yesterday released the details of their redundancy programme to their personnel. The specific trades and branches of each service which are affected by the first tranche of the redundancy programme, along with the numbers being sought from each area have been announced.

In October, following the SDSR the MOD announced that it would be reducing the number of military personnel by 17,000 across all three services; 7,000 from the Army, 5,000 from the Royal Navy and 5,000 from the RAF. While some of these reductions will be achieved through a decrease in recruiting and not replacing those who leave, there will still need to be around 11,000 redundancies. Each service will run a number of redundancy tranches over the next four years with reductions planned to be fully achieved by April 2015.

Although this is a compulsory programme, volunteers will be sought.

The Army has identified 150 redundancy fields by looking at where the Army is in surplus now and where it will still be in surplus in 2015. For this first tranche, there will be approximately 1,000 redundancies, half of which are expected to be volunteers. About 25% of those being made redundant in this tranche will be officers, but no one with less than 8 years experience will be made redundant.

The first tranche of redundancies for the Royal Navy will result in a total of around 1600 redundancies from across a variety of the Naval Serviceâ€™s specialisations and branches, and will include ratings and officers up to the rank of Captain. Those selected will be Officers from the Engineering, Medical, Warfare and Logistics Branches as well as Junior Ratings and Senior Ratings from a variety of Branches.

Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey said:

â€œWe have to ensure that our Armed Forces are best structured for the challenges they face both now and in the future. That said, we would of course prefer not to have to make any of our personnel redundant but unfortunately we inherited a huge deficit in the defence budget from our predecessors in government. On the dates redundancy notices are issued no personnel preparing for, deployed on, or returning from combat operations and on post-tour leave will be made compulsorily redundant.â€